Marketplace Pulse: Amazon + eBay Competitor Analysis

What You On About This Time?

It can be a lonely world for an eBay or Amazon seller. Unless you make yourself part of the community, it can feel like you’re in the game alone, and finding information about other sellers takes a lot of time and effort. You can learn a lot from other sellers, all of which should help you to become a more efficient seller that maximises their profits. But not all of us want to put ourselves out there like that. Some don’t want to interact with the Facebook groups or the YouTubers or the bloggers with the information. Don’t worry: I’ve got an alternative for you.

What is Marketplace Pulse?

Marketplace Pulse popped up in 2016 and provides comprehensive information about Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Walmart marketplace sellers in (where relevant) the UK, US, Germany, France, Italy and all the other places that matter. They scrape the site and collate lists of these sellers, allowing you to sort them by the amount of feedback they’ve received in the last month, last three months, 12 months or the lifetime of their account. It then gives you the ability to access their storefronts, and read about how their approximate sales (determined by feedback) are doing.

What Information Can They Provide?

As I know them best (and I use the site for these), I’ll concentrate on eBay and Amazon.

For eBay sellers:

Storefront

Products in stock

Location

Account age

Recent feedback and rating

Relative ranking among their country’s Amazon sellers

Whether sales are up or down in the last 90 days

For Amazon sellers:

Storefront

Products in stock

Average price of their products

Whether they sell through FBA or fulfil orders themselves

Amount of feedback and rating

Relative ranking among their country’s Amazon sellers

The categories they tend to sell in

Whether sales are up or down in the last six months

For Etsy sellers:

Storefront

Products in stock

Products sold in the last month

Amount of reviews

Whether discount codes are available

Ranking among their all Etsy sellers

I’ll leave out Walmart sellers, as it’s unlikely people in the UK would sell there, but it’s pretty much the same deal on there too.

How Do I Get the Most Out of Marketplace Pulse?

Find sellers like yourself and track them. This goes for private label sellers, FBA online arbitrage sellers, handmade merchants of Etsy, advanced eBay sellers. It’s very powerful. It’s obviously quite easy to find vendors on their marketplaces that sell the same items as you – and may be doing the same tactics to grow their business – but being able to sift through sellers in this way makes it far more efficient.

Make yourself a little spreadsheet of sellers with similar ranges to you, similar account ages to you, and you could create a silent competition with them. Work out which wholesalers they may be sourcing from, what online arbitrage deals they may be going for, and all of those sorts of things. Level up and look at the sellers you’d like to get on the same level as, and work towards it. Marketplace Pulse probably wasn’t made as a motivational tool, but that’s exactly what it is.

For Amazon, it’s a dream. If you have FBA Wizard Pro, the Wizardbar is great to see whether these people may be software-utilising online arbitragers. A tell-tell sign – obviously other than selling Prime-eligible items – will be an abundance of top 1% selling products, and items restricted to a handful of categories.

Why Should I Use Marketplace Pulse?

It’s free and the information found on the site is essential for anyone that wants to make more tactical arbitrage decisions. For those that may have just started, are having trouble growing their business, or have hit a plateaux, it’s incredibly helpful. If you’re already very serious, it will help you to optimise all that you’re doing, and ensure that you at least have insight into how your competition is fairing.